FitzandFloyd is an example of a ColdFusion MX 7 powered e-commerce site, one that uses Flash Forms publicly. (It also uses printing/reporting features, but those are internal). Thanks to the developer, Ken Ferguson, for letting me know of this one.
If you have created a CFMX7 powered site that is using new CFMX7 features publicly, please let me know.
Fitz And Floyd Using Flash Forms
14 responses to “Fitz And Floyd Using Flash Forms”
-
We are trying to utilize all of the CFMX7 functionality, however flash forms are taking an obscene amount of time to load and we have had to dump them. Has anyone run into this issue?
Thanks -
Yes, We have the same problem. Even if it is a simple page with minimal number of components.
-
Have you found a way around this problem? We are running on a 4 CPU SunOS Box with Apache…it is more than capable of compiling these things on the fly.
Thanks -
I am using flash forms on http://www.charliesflybox.com and they seem to run ok.
We were also using cfdocument for printing out the fly patterns but they were quite large and were killing the server (shared server) so we had to remove them. -
humm… Can you say ‘slow’. Try to add an item to a cart and them viewing your cart. I counted 10 seconds from click to page load. Granted their websites seems slow, but nevertheless I would use Html instead of Flash for that kind of performance.
Flash forms are a neat idea, just too slow to load in my mind. Too bad. -
i took a look at the fritz & floyd site. to quote eric…….’hmmm…can you say slow’. i was left with a blank screen while the checkout order form loaded. i haven’t seen any site yet with acceptable cf flash form performance.
neat idea. easy to code. beautiful to look at. just too sloooow on the load.
ben, can we look forward to mm addressing this issue? -
I played with flash forms a fair bit for some projects in the queue, they were just too slow. Ajax & CSS accomplish the same thing, in 1/15th the time.
-
If you’re an online business that cares about the user experience then you’d either go html, html+js or get a custom flash interface made… just plugging in a flash-based cfform with performance like that is ridiculous.
It’s hard to see where the flash-based cfforms sit in the big scheme of things. MM is pushing UX as being a big drawcard for flash interfaces, but flash-based cfforms don’t seem up to par.
Where are flash-based cfform’s useful?
– For a data entry app? Not likely – interface responsiveness is king for data entry.
– For an ecomm site? Doesn’t seem to be a good idea.
The biggest boon for the new cfform functionality i think is the XForm generation… not flash. Either way, I definitely wouldn’t be showing fritz & floyd as a showcase for CF7’s new cfform functionality. -
http://www.fitzandfloyd.com/shop/index.cfm?objectID=E9DC6C09-1028-FF02-B09569F9F2BAD6E2&code=CC59
It seems to break the DIV/TABLE it’s in. -
I started to use flash CFFORM, but the inability to submit and refresh quickly nixed that idea. I think if there were some way to bind things better then it might become more popular. I do know that you can sort of do it with CFC calls, but it isn’t that simple and it would be hard to do an entire form.
Perhaps someone will come up with a handy way of doing it right in flash cfforms. Until then, I’ll just stick with other methods. -
I agree, performance can be a big issue. But we do have customers using Flash Forms successfully, it needs to be the right form and the right use case. And be sure to check out the best practices listed at http://livedocs.macromedia.com/coldfusion/7/htmldocs/00001408.htm.
And Tim, I agree, the XForms support has yet to receive the attention it deserves. -
Oh, and be sure to read this article by Mike Nimer: http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/richforms.html
-
Ben,
Any chance that flash remoting and/or web service calls will make their way into flash forms? It would be great to be able to drill down in large amounts of data using webservices instead of submitting the form to a new page with more info.
In the Fritz checkout form for example they show items of interest on the right side. Currently they can not just add the item to the form when the user clicks…they actually submit the page and bring it up again with the new item added (though there might be a work around). There is no way to make a call back to the server to get estimated shipping cost based on zipcode, submit/validate information to the server as the user goes through steps, etc without submitting the entire form and bringing up a new page.
Thanks for any info about plans for this feature.
Dan -
Ops.. looks like the ColdFusion storefront has been replaced. With WebObjects? 🙁
I think when the internet speeds up, Flash forms have a long way to go. However, as of now, I couldn’t imagine how Flash forms will handle high volume traffic like http://www.petschannel.com which I’m looking to revamp. Guess I’ll stick with CSS for now.
I read CF Form don’t work in tables for IE7? That’s a disaster!
Leave a Reply